Discussing your “why finance” and to what degree is bullshit expected? (IB, PE, ER, M&A, CF)
How do hiring managers evaluate this nonsense? It’s such an open-ended question that the chances of any response being the precise truth is near zero, no? How many people are honestly super into staying at that company forever? They’re all stepping stones but that’s the unspoken part, right?
This reasoning makes absolutely no sense and would thus apply to any open ended question.
Is bullshit expected? No. If your answer sounds like bullshit then it's not going to go well. Your answer must be or at least seem genuine. This is something people legitimately screen for. Do you have to want to stay there forever? No, the question of time horizon doesn't necessarily have to even be brought up, especially with high attrition roles. I don't think you'll get asked this explicitly very much though.
Answering why is simple. Imagine you had to choose one bank over another. Doesn't matter what the alternative is, you can even pick one that is clearly inferior in your mind. Now, define, in specific words, what makes the superior bank superior. Did you have a good conversation with a guy there? Are they the biggest equity platform? Do they do well in your favourite sector? Is their training/whatever best in class? Etc.
why finance and why this company are different questions.
Some of us are actually interested in finance and companies we work at (atleast I am), so my answers are usually authentic.
There is no “true” answer, they just wanna know why you want to be in the industry/ specific bank.
If you’re faking it (maybe just for $?), then still try to incorporate things like how finance is a useful industry or how specific firm does interesting/impactful work. Just comeup with specific reasons/examples and that should be fine.
Is it really that crazy to you that people enjoy finance? Sure a lot of people get into banking for money. But those people typically don’t make it; they burn out.
Why finance, why banking, why my firm are really important questions to me. It's softball, basic soft skills stuff. I don't think I need to emphasize how important soft skills are.
I don't care if your answer is bullshit, made up or complete fiction. Hell I know you're likely already recruiting for the next prestige tier of bank or for PE and I really don't care, your career your trajectory. But I would like to see some effort into these softball questions because again, soft skills matter.
It’s not really bullshit unless you are a shit hire and lack common sense. Good answers make a lot of sense they just ignore the cons. A great example:
I want to do banking because I want to learn about transactions and how companies raise money and market themselves. I want to pick x bank because I talked to people who were nice to me and have a strong interest in x group which seems to be strong here.
Now the truth could also be that there is another group you would prefer over the place you are interviewing and that you wouldn’t want to learn about transactions if it wasn’t going to make you a lot of money, but that doesn’t make the above not true. As rabbit mentioned, it should be an easy question to answer, but I personally have found it’s one of the best questions to ask to undergrads to understand if they actually understand the role they are getting into or are just doing the job because their friends are interviewing. To me it’s a test or critical thinking and how badly the person wants the role.
Again, a really ignorant reductive answer is: all banks are the same and I just want to do the role to make money. There are so many other ways to make money and banks do have differences even if small in the long run. Being a critical thinker means doing research and doing networking calls to figure out differences between banks. As for why finance, I genuinely like my job and while banking sucked on the back end, I learned so much the first 9 months that while it was hard I did enjoy it to a degree.
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